Pamela Barden - Fundraising Resolution No. 2: Get Organized

By Pamela Barden

Last week, I began a series of articles on resolutions for 2014, beginning with “Get Fit.” That’s one of the most common resolutions that gets made (and broken?) each new year.

The second resolution that comes directly to you from the list of frequent resolutions made each year is “Get organized.” Ah — another great one for fundraisers!

After surviving the year-end pressure of mailings, e-mails, last-minute receipt of stock and other appreciated assets, sending out greeting cards, and attending the holiday party, “organized” sounds like a good plan — but also like more work than our cookie-filled minds may want to undertake. So here are a few ideas to help start 2014 off on a less cluttered note. And for the record, I am not nagging! Just sharing ideas that I’ve come up with to solve my own disorganization crises …

Banish the random bits of paper
For years, my inbox overflowed with pages torn out of magazines, vacation spots I just had to check out when I retire, business cards, fundraising ideas and facts worth remembering … you get the picture. Worse was my file of articles that dated back to the early 1980s — much of it still timely, but it was impossible to quickly find anything when I needed it. These were long before e-mail and PDFs, so electronically filing was going to require scanning (and that meant time).

While I assume there are many great ways to tackle the piles of paper, I have conquered my clutter with a free (love that word!) program called Evernote. It’s on my smartphone, my laptop and my tablet. When I see something worth saving, I snap a photo and store that in one of my Evernote folders with sensible names like “Work-related,” “Travel ideas” and “Business cards.” Then the paper itself gets recycled. Result? When I needed to find the “reasonable fundraising costs” that Jerry Panas provided months ago, it was right there in the “Work-related” folder with the subject line of “Reasonable FR Costs — Jerry Panas.” (OK, I never claimed to be creative in naming notes.)